One by One by One
SOLO EXHIBITION BY:
Pinky Ibarra Urmaza
SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA:
Pinky Ibarra Urmaza explores ruins as sites of potential from which something
else could emerge. Her muse is New York City, where she has lived half her life,
as she witnesses its efforts to rebuild after being the epicenter of the pandemic.
“Now I see that the city is roaring back to life; it was just in hibernation. It is a
town of improvisation, constantly adapting and weathering the trauma and
challenges of the pandemic.”
Through deconstruction and reconstruction, she pieces together old book parts
broken by age, vintage paper fragments colored with time and other castaways
like game pieces, photographs and torn envelopes. She arranges these
compositions in grid-like patterns that echo the city planning of New York, with its
numbered grids and blocks. In comparison to past works, her collages have
become more geometric, akin to the piling up of buildings within a dense city.
She draws our attention to the wear and tear of textured surfaces, to frayed
edges and rips that evoke resilient grit and layers of history.
In this series, she introduces a brighter color palette to represent hope and
optimism. Such palette is evident all over New York infrastructure: the identifying
markers of subway routes, the rainbow flags, the murals on crumbling walls and
the graffiti under abandoned bridges. There are no human figures in her collages,
yet we are keenly aware of the human elements imbued in her narrative. Tiny
details give us clues of the artist’s intervention—traces of graphite, ink and
charcoal. Urmaza’s subtle touch leave us guessing where material residues
overlap with her deliberate additions, much like how repurposed buildings have
faint traces of their former functions and decoration amidst more recent renewals.
The titles reflect her memories of specific places in the city, her favorite areas
and corners. “New York sidewalks have always been a theater for urban life. All
those hours of walking along its streets and avenues have given me time to
reflect on important parts of who I am. This is where I have experienced loss and
have also made new discoveries. Last year, the city became an eerie ghost of its
former self, with museums closed for months, subways almost completely empty
and Broadway going dark for over a year. Seeing it struggle through this
pandemic is like seeing myself pick up parts of me that have drifted away.”
New York City has been in a constant state of reinvention since the beginning of
its 400-year history. Its cityscape is an amalgamation of various architectural
periods. Just like the artist herself, the city is a sum of its past lives and shifting
identities. Winston Churchill famously said, “We shape our buildings.
Thereafter, they shape us.”
